Buffy Reboot Cancelled, Sarah Michelle Gellar Confirms

By Jennifer Asencio
| Published 34 seconds ago

The Hulu reboot of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, directed by Chloe Zhao, has been cancelled. The announcement was made on March 14, 2026, by a post from star Sarah Michelle Gellar on Instagram.

A Failure To Launch

There were mixed hopes for the new series, which was announced last year as a pilot was developed. Zhao has won an Oscar already for Nomadland and was up for several this season for Hamnet (she didn’t win, but Jessie Buckley did win Best Actress for the movie), but she also directed the Marvel flop Eternals. Although she proclaims herself to be a life-long fan of the original series, there were a lot of less famous fans who were skeptical she could fill the shoes of show creator Joss Whedon.

Whedon initially created the character for a 1992 movie of the same name starring Kristy Swanson, but reinvented her for the show that dominated young adult television, which started in 1997. He was not included among the creatives working on the reboot, which opted instead for an all-female development team. Whedon’s other best-known television property, Firefly, announced the same weekend that it was also being rebooted as an animated series. Similarly, Whedon will not involved in the animated series.

There’s Still Hope

Gellar was to be among the cast of the reboot, with Buffy serving in a mentor role for a new character and a new support cast. This would have put Buffy in the role of Giles for the new slayer, and there were numerous rumors that other previous cast members would be coming home to Sunnyvale to provide their own aid.

Disney and Hulu are not done with ideas for the Buffy franchise. There have been new ideas in development since 2018, and the idea of a new Buffy show is still appealing to the House of Mouse, but the pilot for this one apparently didn’t coincide with their vision. They turned it down on Friday the 13^th, which Buffy could appreciate, right after Gellar praised the reboot at the SXSW film festival, where she was promoting her new movie, Ready or Not 2.

Fans are disappointed that the series has been cancelled, and so is Sarah Michelle Gellar. However, reboots and spin-off shows have been inconsistent: while the resurgence of Scrubs has been enjoyed by many, Starfleet Academy has failed to interest a lot of Star Trek fans, and Paramount’s endless parade of rebooted shows like Matlock, Hawaii Five-O, and The Equalizer are merely filler, counting on the nostalgia bait. We’ll never know which category the new Buffy show would have fallen into, but hopefully something better is coming from the Buffyverse soon.